When we look back at the Enlightenment in the 18th century, we pay special attention to the writings of some authoritative Enlightenment thinkers: Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Hume, Smith, Kant, etc., because we feel that they express new ideas, and we even think that these new ideas have shaped our modern consciousness and the modern world.
Written by Zhang Hong
The French Pantheon, the coffins of the Enlightenment philosophers Rousseau, Voltaire and others are in it. Eric from United States
In countries with deep and long authoritarian traditions, such as 18th-century Russia, enlightenment was even more difficult. The experience of the Russian Decembrists shows that enlightenment not only involves the relentless suppression of power and the limitations of speech, but also a lasting test of perseverance and patience on the part of the Enlighteners themselves, who may not see hope and results for a long time, and which are unfamiliar to a considerable part of the population – they are often more concerned with the most pressing economic problems. The Enlightenment shows that this was the case with the vast majority of French enlightenment philosophers in the 18th century: on the one hand, some listeners may feel that the Enlightenment always talks about these unattainable things too far from reality; on the other hand, even people in the same camp may feel that the Enlighteners always repeat the words freedom, democracy, etc., and feel tired of not being fresh.
On the other hand, The Enlightenment with the Times shows that the French Enlightenment philosophers had an ambiguous attitude towards absolute monarchy. Queen Catherine II of Russia had a long association with many Enlightenment philosophers and had financed them financially; however, she did not implement the Enlightenment ideas in power, but continued to maintain her absolute monarchy.
What are the limitations of enlightenment? How big is the role of enlightenment? Why do some intellectuals reject the enlightenment of liberal democracy? On related issues, Yanjing Book Review interviewed Professor Xu Ben. Because of its length, the full text was published in three parts. The first is devoted to the history of the Enlightenment; the second is devoted to the concept of enlightenment, and the third is devoted to the Chinese enlightenment. Today's second article is published. The first was published yesterday, and the third will be published tomorrow, and readers can view it in the official account of the Yanjing Book Review (ID: Pekingbooks).
Xu Ben is a professor of the Department of English at St. Mary's College in California, USA, and an adjunct professor at the Institute of Advanced Social Sciences of Fudan University. Born in 1950 in Suzhou, ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="8" > the temptation of Syracuse: Why do intellectuals walk with tyranny? </h1>
Yanjing Book Review: The French Enlightenment and the German Enlightenment prove that the Enlightened People's hopes for enlightened despotism can only consolidate the monarchy and the basis of its rule, and King Frederick II of Prussia and Queen Catherine II of Russia have associated with the French Enlightenment philosophers Voltaire, Diderot, jean-Leland-d'Alembert; however, they have not changed their despotic rule. Plato's three trips to Syracuse, the ambiguous relationship between the Enlightened Philosophers and the Autocratic Rulers... Why do intellectuals go back and forth to pursue careers that are contrary to their own ideas and have not been successful?
Xu Ben: It is difficult to find a single reason for such a complex phenomenon, but the phenomenon itself is full of irony and tragedy. It deserves our high attention because it is not only an ancient phenomenon, but also a common phenomenon of intellectuals in the 20th century. George Orwell has a profound analysis of this phenomenon in his essay Arthur Kesterler. Arthur Kesterler is the author of the famous novel The Darkness of High Noon. I have a detailed analysis of this novel in my book History of Tyranny. Kesterler, disgusted by his bourgeois origins, joined the left-wing movement in his early years, and eventually withdrew from the party due to disillusionment. The British politician and writer Richard Kruseman, who compiled a memoir by six leftist intellectuals, including Kesterer, "The God that Failed," each of them talked about why they participated in a political cause that was inconsistent with their own humanitarian ideals, for different reasons.
In his book Political Psychology (Jilin Publishing Group Co., Ltd., April 2010 edition), norwegian social and political scientist Jon Elster attempts to analyze the common choice rationality of leftist intellectuals. In this mental mechanism, "wishes are adjusted according to the means (or possibilities) by which they are fulfilled." ...... Because sometimes, we want to get something we can't have, just because we can't have it. If we consider the behavior of citizens in totalitarian regimes, we will find that those who condemn Western freedom and emphasize the evils of Western society are very much like the foxes in la Fontaine's fables. Because you can't get what you want, you take what is inferior to it as your choice, not as a "sub-good" choice, but as a "superior" choice, or even the only choice that is valuable and must be accepted by everyone. At the beginning of the 20th century, many Western intellectuals, disillusioned with Western democracy and freedom, regarded the Soviet Union as a "special good" or even the only option.
In the political options of the early 20th century, if an intellectual had abandoned liberal democracy (which was indeed very bad at the time), the only valid options left seemed to be communism and fascism. The American psychologist Walter Michel has a famous psychological discovery: the coherence of behavior in different environments is often quite weak. A person can be aggressive in a working personnel relationship but gentle at home; selfish in one environment and altruistic in another. Two different understandings can be made of this: one is that the environment is the driving factor of mental mechanisms; the other is that there are two or more different selves in the individual. Intellectuals, while favoring humanitarianism, are willing to serve authoritarian rulers, and at least behaviorally weak coherence and contradictions in moral principles should be said to be a reason.
A History of Tyranny: Power and The People of the Twentieth Century, by Xu Ben, Oxford University Press, July 2020
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="14" > between the populace and the ruler: the unfree spread of Enlightenment knowledge</h1>
Yenching Book Review: The Enlightenment That Advances with The Times shows that the French Enlightenment focused on reason, the English Enlightenment put social virtues at the forefront of philosophical thinking and social policy, and social virtues became sufficient conditions for public good, while the American Enlightenment put freedom first (p. 222). Professor Eric Fanner is even more based on freedom, writing the general history of the United States "Give Me Freedom!" (The Commercial Press, January 2011 edition). In your book, you analyze the uniqueness of the American Enlightenment, and I feel that the United States does not have the historical baggage of the absolute monarchy of Britain and France, which is also a favorable condition for it, right?
Xu Ben: It is indeed a favorable condition to not have a king riding on your head every day; however, the people of the American colonies have long recognized the British monarchy, and they regard themselves as subjects of the British king, so it cannot be said that they are completely free of the historical baggage of the monarchy. Until the United States broke away from Britain's constitutional monarchy and created its own independent polity, the peoples of the American colonies would not see themselves as republican citizens.
The concept of "Americans" was formed and changed with the concept of "America". Although it is customary to refer to Americans before independence as "citizens," this is anachronistic or misleading claim. This was because a republic in solidarity with the citizens had not yet been established on the American continent, and the peoples of the Americas were merely "subjects" of the British king. When the American Revolutionaries established a new republican character, refused to accept the legitimacy of hereditary monarchs and nobles, and gave all the basic citizens of the republic their equal share of national sovereignty, it was then that the "citizen" acquired its indispensable and exciting status. Equally important, once each expressed his political demands in the language of "revolution," the king and his subjects became polar opposites.
Therefore, the unique significance of the revolution for the American Enlightenment cannot be overemphasized. As Paine said in his booklet Common Sense, which promotes the revolution, the very existence of the throne is a threat to the freedom of the people, and "the closer any form of government comes to a republic, the less the king needs to do." The people could not expect the wise men as much as they did by hitting the great fortunes, and Paine wrote: "If this system guarantees the provision of a group of good and wise people, it may be regarded as a concession of divine power, but in fact it is only a convenient door for fools, wicked people, and vulgar people, so it has the character of suffering." Those who regarded themselves as natural rulers and as natural slaves soon became overbearing. Since they were chosen from the rest of human beings, their psyche had long been poisoned by arrogance. ”
Although the peoples of the American colonies did not have their own kings, they had been mentally and mentally difficult to get rid of the British king who ruled them. Paine's pamphlets taught them the enlightenment that to overthrow and get rid of the king, the people must first get rid of their own habitual psychology of dependence on the king. The enormity of the Enlightenment is that this habit of the people is deeply rooted, as was the case with north Americans before the revolution, and it is still the case in some countries of the world today because they are accustomed to being slaves or slaves. This is why we can still perceive its fiery revolutionary passion when we read Common Sense today.
Yanjing Book Review: As you mention in the book, in the absence of changes in the absolute monarchies of European countries, the enlightenment philosophers' ideas of change helped their countries to become strong and helped to maintain their autocratic rule, and these European monarchs adopted them. However, reforms that are detrimental to their authoritarian rule, such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press, will be rejected by the rulers. And the history of European countries also shows that only by overthrowing absolute monarchy or other forms of absolutism can enlightenment values be truly embodied.
Xu Ben: Any reform of authoritarian dictatorship is utilitarian, all aimed at strengthening, not weakening, its own rule, in other words, a logical mechanism of "consequentialism," i.e., instrumental rationality. But the enlightenment's value appeals—freedom, reason, tolerance, humanism—obeyed what Kant called the logic of pure reason, a kind of critical reason. It has a "non-consequential" logical mechanism for freedom, reason, tolerance, and humanism, not because these values can whitewash the image of despotism and decorate its façade, so as to achieve a more revealing effect, but because their essence is good and moral. In the 18th century, this essential goodness was expressed in terms of "natural law": only such moral values were consistent with the natural nature of man and the natural order of the universe.
The moral critique of the Enlightenment and the purpose of authoritarian rule are bound to be contradictory and cannot operate in the same track; but the Enlightenment philosophers, out of the need for a strategy of struggle, will not allow this contradiction to be exposed at any time and at any time. Due to the limitations of the realpolitik environment, the 18th-century Enlightenment philosophers had to oscillate between the utilitarian and non-consequential natural laws of consequentialism. As Guy points out in The Age of Enlightenment, they tried to base "natural law on experience" and that "their epistemology, sociology, and historical studies have subverted the logic of natural law, but they continue to use the language of natural law to underpin their social critique and guide their program of change." In their writings, natural law seems to be a commonplace, as if it were some kind of abbreviated symbol known to all educated people and most of the uneducated. To this day, we can still see such helplessness and distress in the spread of unfree Enlightenment knowledge.
"Enlightenment with the Times", by Xu Ben, Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, January 2021 edition.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="24" > the civic enlightenment of the 21st century: in addition to "daring to seek knowledge", it is also necessary to be "good at seeking knowledge"</h1>
Yanjing Book Review: I feel that enlightenment is more difficult in countries with deep authoritarian traditions and a long time (such as 18th-century Russia), which not only includes the relentless suppression of power and the restriction of speech, but also a lasting test of perseverance and patience for the enlighteners themselves, because there may be no hope and results for a long time. The Enlightenment that keeps pace with the times shows that this was the case with the vast majority of French enlightenment philosophers in the 18th century. On the one hand, some listeners may feel that the old talk of these unattainable things is too far from reality; on the other hand, even people in the same camp will feel that the Enlighteners are always repeating words such as freedom and democracy, and feel tired of not being new. What do you think about this?
Xu Ben: I mention in the book that a Chinese scholar expressed contempt for enlightenment, and he believed that enlightenment could no longer have anything new to tell us, as if enlightenment was just a tedious repetition of grand concepts such as "reason", "freedom", and "progress". Another scholar asserts that "all that the so-called 'Enlightenment' has to do is probably only to provide everyone with a set of moral and ethical bottom lines, to solve a low-level problem, that is, what cannot be done." And the higher-order dilemma, that is, what should people do? What is the meaning of human life? These problems need to be solved by some high-level religion or civilization. Enlightenment could only solve problems on a secular level, and those deep spiritual ultimate questions needed to rely on a classical revival to seek answers in Axial Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and ancient Greek civilization. ”
Is there really nothing new to enlighten or anything about the depths of the human soul to teach us? No one who knows anything about enlightenment would think so. From Peter Guy's The Party of Humanity and The Age of Enlightenment in the 1950s and 1960s to Pinker's Enlightenment in 2018, so many Western university scholars have positively evaluated the Enlightenment over the past half century, articulating its important connection to contemporary ideas, let alone dozens, are they all "cultural idiots" or "busy"?
There is no special knowledge under the heavens that has an enlightening effect on all people, and you feel that it has an enlightening effect on you, and it is enlightened knowledge for you. Today, as we look back at the 18th-century Enlightenment, we pay particular attention to the writings of some authoritative Enlightenment thinkers: Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Hume, Smith, Kant, etc., because we feel that they expressed new ideas, and we even believe that these new ideas have shaped our modern consciousness and the modern world. They become advocates of modernity in our minds, because the essence of modernity is that it is in constant change, always becoming more modern.
However, while these Enlightenment thinkers were alive, their books were written for ordinary people to read, not "classics" that we read today in university graduate classes or for experts and scholars to write monographs. As the study of the history of reading reveals, the reading of readers in the 18th century was vast and had no particular focus, and the so-called "Enlightenment ideas" were not naturally in a leading position above other ideas, as we think today. As with any era of reading, the reader's reading process (selectively focusing on the reading, topic, and discussion) is very diverse.
The Enlightenment of the Present: Defending Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, by Stephen Pinker, translated by Hou Xinzhi, Ouyang Mingliang, and Wei Wei, Zhanlu Culture 丨Zhejiang People's Publishing House, December 2018
In this regard, the American historian Timothy Tackett wrote in The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (the Chinese translation of Violence and Counterviolence: The Politics of Terror in the French Revolution has been introduced and published by Han Tang Sunshine): "The content that the reader encounters in the process of reading is not equal to the content that he accepts and approves." In fact, the wide variety of works (of the 18th century) often contradicted each other in terms of their way of writing and their basic political philosophical views. Some authors emphasize that writing styles should be rational and serious, and treat knowledge with scientific rigor, while others praise intuition and emotion as scarce and precious qualities in contemporary works; some authors endorse top-down changes initiated by the royal family and the ruling class, while others emphasize the need to put public opinion and public opinion first. Some authors vigorously attack the Catholic Church and religion itself, while others preach the combination of humanistic reason and self-determination with Catholic doctrine ('Catholic Enlightenment thought'); some works are written through through literary and philosophical thinking, while others focus primarily on political economy issues; some advocate the 'common will' as the new authority, while others remain skeptical about the existence of a holistic conception of 'public'. "Which kind of knowledge to use, and which way to convey knowledge, has enlightenment significance, and it needs to be decided by each reader himself.
If anyone wants to know what people should do? What is the meaning of man's life, he does not need prayer or divine revelation at all, nor does he need a higher religion; for him, secular humanistic education can be a good enlightenment. If anyone needs to know why and how to reason, then knowledge of reasoning, such as Robert's Rules of Procedure, can be a subject of enlightenment useful to him, and this is a new subject, because the 18th-century Enlightenment did not deal specifically with this subject. If anyone who first thinks that logic or scientific thinking can solve the problem of public reasoning, but then finds that a person who has studied logic or science will still be deceived or deceive himself, then critical thinking that takes into account cognitive, ethical, and emotional factors can become a useful enlightenment topic for him. If anyone feels that the various paranoid opinions on the Internet are seriously hindering the formation of citizen consensus, and wants to know why, then the relationship between subjective or cultural relativity and tolerance may become a new subject of enlightenment.
Even Kant, who was thought to be the spokesman of enlightenment, can become a new subject of enlightenment. Kant's definition of "enlightenment" is no longer satisfactory to us today, because it no longer adapts to the more complex enlightenment environment that has changed to this day. By "dare to seek knowledge," he refers only to the will of the seeker himself—to say goodbye to ignorance, to eliminate superstition, to overcome self-deception or credulity, to break all kinds of self-restraint. Today, we know that there is no such will to achieve these enlightenment goals; in addition to such goals, we need to have a corresponding way of seeking knowledge.
Violence and Counter-Violence: The Politics of Terror in the French Revolution, by Tan Xuan, translated by Huang Danlu, Hantang Sunshine 丨 Shanxi People's Publishing House, March 2019
According to Kant's "dare to seek knowledge", the dissemination of knowledge itself does not seem to be a problem, the problem is "dare not to dare". Judging from the production and dissemination of knowledge today, things are not so simple. Today, real knowledge and false knowledge are mixed together, and there is also half-truth knowledge. Moreover, false knowledge spreads much faster than real knowledge. If you dare to seek knowledge, don't you first need to know what kind of knowledge to pursue?
Mark Twain said that the truth has just put on its shoes, and the lies have run through half the world; isn't it even more so in the Internet age? On March 9, 2018, Science, the world's top technology magazine, published a paper titled "False News Travel 6 Times Faster on Twitter than Truthful News" ("False News Travel 6 Times Faster on Twitter than Truthful News"), and a study found that fake news is more accessible than the truth, and the top 1% of fake news spread to between 1,000 and 100,000 people. And the truth rarely spreads to more than 1,000 people. It was previously believed that citizens had the right to know, that the news media was an independent fourth power, and that people had access to truthful intellectual information as long as there was freedom of the press. Today we know that this is a "cultural myth" that is not in line with reality, so in addition to Kant's "dare to seek knowledge", we must add "good at seeking knowledge", which is a more comprehensive and practical "enlightenment". Isn't this a new subject of enlightenment?
Can we believe that the Enlightenment has nothing new to say, or that it can only be some "low-level" things, experts, scholars, and professors tell us this? Without enlightenment, we would really be deceived by mishearing and misbehaving.
The Cognition and Ethics of Critical Thinking, by Xu Ben, Peking University Press, February 2021
Yanjing Book Review: The Enlightenment of Advancing with the Times, French rationalism believes that individuals can see clearly and clearly know how to transform the various systems and traditions of society through reason. If the people cannot accept the new things involved in reason, they must be educated (enlightened) and forced to change if they are not effective, that is, to transform society and to shape new people. The transition from idealism to empiricism advocated by Gu Zhun is a profound reflection on this issue. In the book, you distinguish between pure reason, practical reason, and theoretical reason. The political system of the United States is also the result of the rational design of the American Founding Fathers to a certain extent, and at the same time absorbs British empiricism (Gu Zhun also emphasizes this point). So, in the process of enlightenment, how should rationalism and empiricism be treated?
Xu Ben: First of all, we need to know what was "rationalism" and "empiricism" as people understood it in the 18th century, and their understanding was not the same as what we understand today. The 18th-century Enlightenment philosophers understood "rationalism" to refer to the transcendental rationalism of Descartes; Voltaire made his aversion to this rationalism in the English Book, and he admired the empiricism represented by Bacon and Newton. Voltaire wrote in the English Book, "England is such a land: ... It is not the birthplace of Cartesians ('he spreads far more errors than he eliminates'), Malebrances ('his illusion is entirely sublime'), the cynical La Roche-Fuucault and the skeptic Montaigne, but the birthplace of Bacon ('the great empiricist'), Locke ('the wisest man'), Newton ('the greatest man')". Voltaire's idealized portrayal of Britain, while not unbiased, did not diminish its influence. It promoted an enlightening view of the French at the time: modern England embodied the connection between commerce, science, military might, religious tolerance, freedom, and a stable and sound government.
Today, people who lack understanding of the 18th-century Enlightenment are always opposing the so-called "rationalism" of the French Enlightenment with the "empiricism" of the Scottish Enlightenment; in fact, the most valuable thing in French Enlightenment thought is the critical rationalism it uses to resist a priori rationalism, which is often distorted by posterity into "instrumental reason", so I also call it "smeared reason". The rationality advocated by the French Enlightenment philosophers is the power of thought that eliminates ignorance, superstition and repression. When Kant speaks of reason, he means overcoming the immaturity that man imposes on himself, he said, "Our epoch can be called the age of criticism, from which nothing can escape, from which religion attempts to hide behind the sacred, from which the law attempts to hide behind dignity, and the result is to arouse the suspicion of them and to lose the place of sincere reverence for them, for only what can stand the free and public examination of reason can earn the respect of reason." (Preface to the 1st Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason) I have a special discussion of this in my book The Enlightenment that Advances with The Times, and I will not say more about it here.
Adam Smith, a representative figure of the British Enlightenment. Eric from United States
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="43" > Enlightenment: The Legitimacy of Freedom toward the Future</h1>
Yanjing Book Review: The Enlightenment made the values of freedom and equality widely accepted by people, and throughout the history of the United States, it is a history of the gradual expansion of freedom and equality. But the political scientist Cong Riyun pointed out the other side of this phenomenon, namely that freedom and equality have caused many problems, and he questioned, "Is the more freedom the better?" Is the more equality the better? Of course, Professor Cong Riyun is in favor of liberal democracy, and what he emphasizes is only a question of "degree". For the latecomer countries, the problem may be far-reaching, because there is neither freedom nor equality, and the fight for both is the most important mission. But I wonder, what do you think about this?
Xu Ben: The core of the Enlightenment's ideology is freedom, not equality. Diderot said: "Every age has its typical spirit, and the spirit of our time is the spirit of freedom." In essence, Enlightenment reason embodied man's free cognition. The Renaissance was the legitimacy of freedom from the past, and the Enlightenment was the legitimacy of freedom from the future. Among the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Rousseau was an outlier. He was not a liberal, but a democrat, so he advocated equality.
Rousseau emphasized that democracy cannot take form, and that its operation cannot be separated from a specific social environment, including moral equality, legal equality, and relative economic equality. Other Enlightenment philosophers, including Holbach, Hume, and others, also saw the social function of substantial equality, but Rousseau incorporated equality into his theoretical system. According to him, no one should sell himself to others because he was poor, nor should someone be rich enough to buy someone else. Thus, freedom and equality are not at all opposing or incompatible with each other; in Rousseau's view, the two are indispensable and mutually reinforcing allies. The French jurist René Cassin said the four pillars of value of the French Revolution were "dignity, freedom, equality and fraternity." Carson was one of the leading drafters of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, chaired the Un Commission on Human Rights and President of the European Court of Human Rights (the European Court of Human Rights is located in Strasbourg, France), and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968 for his contributions to the drafting of the Declaration of Human Rights. In Carson's formulation, freedom and equality are juxtaposed.
In the American Declaration of Independence, freedom and equality are juxtaposed, but freedom means the innate rights of man, "we believe that the following truths are self-evident: all men are created equal, and the Creator gives them unavoidable rights, including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." "Freedom is not abstract, as the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution makes clear. Neither freedom of speech nor belief is indulgent, but an orderly freedom; free choice must be a responsible choice, and responsible choice cannot infringe on the equal rights of other citizens.
"Equality" here includes equality. America was born with the dream of equality. "All men are created equal," I am afraid that no other word can resonate so much with the American psyche. The founding fathers of the United States believed in the political principle of equality, believing that no one is born to be above others. The rule of the government derives only from the authority of the ruled. Political equality was originally expressed as formal equality, that is, equality in law. In 1789, the first Congress included this commitment in the Bill of Rights, guaranteeing that under the new federal government, the law would protect all Americans equally. The American Civil War began with a divergent understanding of the above principle of equality and was the bloodiest war since the founding of the United States. In 1866, after the Civil War, Congress introduced the 14th Amendment, passed in 1868, known as the "Second Constitution" because of its importance, and its first paragraph clearly stated that "no one shall be denied equal legal protection". The American Revolution was henceforth not only a political revolution, but also a social revolution.
In On Democracy in America, Tocqueville spoke many times about the relationship between freedom and equality in American democracy. Tocqueville would like to see freedom and equality manifested in democracy at the same time, but he was particularly concerned that equality as a social value or ideology could threaten freedom in reality, and therefore democratic societies must seek to prevent the political pitfalls of equality of status, such as the tyranny of the majority, populist politics, careerist seduction, centralization, etc. These political hidden dangers, all of which appeared in the 2020 US election to varying degrees, are serious practical problems facing American democratic politics today.
Laboratory illustration of the Encyclopedia edited by Diderot. Eric from United States
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="51" > history and story: an important channel for spreading enlightenment</h1>
Yanjing Book Review: In recent years, the academic community has advocated reform and opposed the violent French Revolution. However, in the process of overcoming despotism in Britain, the nobles and kings also had a long war. As you say in the book, both the English and French enlightenments had a real need to overcome despotism and tame the monarchy. You emphasize in the book that the relationship between the Enlightenment and realpolitik cannot be exaggerated, so how can we look at the real history objectively, and at the same time truly use the past for the present?
Xu Ben: Historical writing plays a very important role in the dissemination of enlightenment knowledge: there are stories in history, and it is also using scientific methods to "discover" the "truth" of the past. Thus, even in the age of intellectual discussion, history can still tell its story with great interest in the cracks of the censorship of ideas. At present, history is the most popular and popular in the domestic humanities, which is related to this reason. Hume said that history "suits every talent," that is, historians who are not professionals are qualified to write about history. The first thing a jurist, literary researcher, or researcher of political philosophy needs to do to have a deep understanding of the object of his or her study is to figure out the relevant history. So, for the enlightened philosophers of the 18th century, it was natural to be interested in history. Writers who are not specialized historians are interested in historical greats or deeds, and they will continue to collect material in order to write rich and informative " stories" that are otherwise meaningful.
Of course, history pursues the truth, which is an old cliché that is constantly reiterated, but few people do it. There are many things in Voltaire's history that are not true, but this does not prevent him from saying, "We all need truth in the smallest things." In 1750, in a letter to a friend, he said, "In this foreign land, I should once again hunt down my favorite prey: the truth." I visited the ancient battlefields like Polybia. I asked not only my friends, but also my counterparts... History is neither satirical nor hymns. ”
For the average reader of history, however, they do not have the ability to test whether the historian is faithful to his oath of "objective pursuit of historical truth"; every doctor takes the Hippocratic oath of virtue before practicing medicine, but the number of doctors who have lost morality does not decrease. Therefore, when I read history, I tend to put aside the verification of the truth, but I am more concerned about whether historians can consciously help us "use the past for the present." Tocqueville was a historian who could do that. He will associate historical observation with human nature observation, and human nature will not change, and there will be a connection between ancient and modern.
For example, he wrote in The Old Regime and the Great Revolution: "Revolutions do not always occur because people are getting worse and worse. Most often, people who have always endured the most intolerable law without complaint, as if in a nonchalant manner, will violently abandon it as soon as the pressure of the law is relieved. A regime destroyed by a revolution is almost always better than the regime that precedes it, and experience tells us that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually the moment when it begins to reform. Tocqueville's analysis of popular discontent and defiance was very accurate. Living under the habitual tyrannical oppression, people patiently endure suffering, thinking that it is inevitable, but once someone comes up with the idea to eliminate suffering, it becomes intolerable. The pain has indeed lessened, but the feelings have become more acute. Tocqueville drew on the old narrative to conclude that "feudalism did not arouse hatred in the hearts of the French at its height more than it did in its demise." Louis XVI's slightest tyrannical actions seemed more intolerable than the entire autocracy of Louis XIV. ”（215-216）
For example, Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has also been criticized by experts for being untrue, but this does not prevent me from interest in this work, because in his history I can constantly find reminders of the connection between ancient and modern. In chapter 38, he writes, "The fall of Rome is the natural, inevitable result of infinite expansion. Prosperity becomes a factor of decay, the cause of destruction expands with the magnitude of conquest, and once time or accident is removed from man-made support, this huge building succumbs to its own heavy pressure. Interestingly, he said, "We do not ask why the Roman Empire perished, but marveled at why it lasted so long", and then said, "Those invincible legions, infected by the problems of foreigners and foreign mercenaries in distant wars, first suppressed the freedom of the republic, and then destroyed the majesty of the emperor... The power of the military government gradually relaxed ... A torrent of barbarians flooded the Roman world. "In my opinion, such a history can be called the history of spreading enlightenment knowledge.